Hello dominant life form of planet Earth. Yes, that means you Homo Sapiens. I’ve watched as over the millennia you evolved from a primitive ape-like hominid species, surviving purely by instinct, to the technology-wielding, sophisticated-thinking creature of today. Truly, the planet became your smorgasbord and you have partaken freely. As a matter of fact, you have very nearly emptied the planet’s entire refrigerator and cupboards and are now preparing to lick your plate clean. I’ve been throwing up some warning signs, especially this past year, to try to get your attention and perhaps make you reconsider your current omnivorous appetite. After all, you do share the planet with other life forms who have been hoping someone or something will put an end to your callous industrial rampage. I’ve even set in motion a sort of evolutionary check-and-balance, a doomsday device if you will, in the form of atmospheric heat-trapping gases, ensuring your demise just in case you don’t get the message of behavior modification. In other words, your dominant socio-economic paradigm of capitalism is fatally flawed.

Your voracious appetite for the world’s natural resources — fish, timber, potable water, arable land, minerals, et al. — continues unabated. And after consuming them, you leave behind mountains of waste and destruction. Does it always take a crisis before you creatures take action? Instead of waiting until you suffocate to death in a world of hypoxic oceans and dead forests, try listening to those lone voices of dissent screaming for your attention:

Look, I have news for you. The human economy does not take precedence over the Earth’s natural ecological processes which have evolved over millions of years to provide you with clean water, clean air, fertile land, and productive plant and animal life. All of these priceless necessities have been given to you at no charge to your accounting ledger. I guess free lunches are something no human can refuse, but the bill will come due no matter how you try to hide it by pushing it off onto the environment and future generations. In a planet without a stable biosphere, your glimmering metropolises with their megalithic concrete and steel structures reaching heavenward are nothing more than fleeting sand castles to be washed away by the next rogue wave of a surging sea… Sandy was just a warm-up event. Perhaps a new ‘Dust Bowl’ event and heat waves down under demanding a new color code on the weather map and droughts rendering useless a nation’s hydroelectric power will do the trick. I suppose as long as the $tock exchanges of the world are operable, your “business as usual” scheme of perpetual growth and converting all the natural world into capitalist symbols of wealth will carry on its merry way right over the edge of global extinction. And you thought the “fiscal cliff” was something to worry about?

As a mentor and intellectual peer of this site said recently, “tribes and societies that did master effective class consciousness thrived, for a very long time. Those that didn’t, don’t.” At today’s massive scale of production and consumption, the human and environmental exploitation characterized by modern industrial capitalism undermines the long-term existence of mankind along with every other living organism on the planet. Capitalism shoehorns everything into its profit-seeking regime, no matter if that means global genocide on a scale never heretofore seen:

…Actually, the more I reflect on it, the clearer I see the logic, the rationale, behind the bankers’ and the capitalists’ push for privatization. It is not just more profits they are after, not just share price or corporate valuation; no! They are after mass extermination, genocide on a grand scale – of the world’s needy, the under-funded, the unwanted, the uncivilized, the savages and the barbarians, the commies and the Islamists, in short, elimination of all of the Others.

The big boyz have seen all the data and crunched all the numbers, and it is clear to them – the earth is running out of resources, Mars is -50 C all of the time, and we can no longer afford to carry all of this excess baggage here on the planet — all of these miserable, thankless, do-nothing mouths to feed. So the plan is brilliant. You reduce the number from 7+ billion by at least 33% without firing one shot. You simply privatize all natural resources and then price access so that the bottom third of the globe’s population cannot afford it. And so, they die; it will be the biggest die-off of the Anthropocene epoch…

You ignore my overt signals at your own peril.

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

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17 thoughts on “Earth to Humans: “Get Off Your Merry-Go-Round Ride to Extinction””

Good to see you back xrayMike!! Great graphics and essential, provocative reading as always.

I have to dispute the basic premise in the Alternet article, however! I agree that capitalism is evil. But romanticizing past constructs isn’t helpful either (and neither is accusing the Ehrlich’s of racism). The author throws out all sorts of straw man arguments, but there are a couple of statements that underpin his theory that capitalism is somehow intrinsically worse than other, earlier human economic systems that are especially laughable.

“…plenty of cases exist where industrial organization did not bankrupt or degrade nature on a massive scale…”

cite some please? That statement is really the foundation of what is becoming a religion – the faith that humans are innately sustainable, and our bottleneck arises from one evil source, capitalism. It must be comforting, because if capitalism is the problem, and not humanity’s instinctively insatiable appetite, then there’s hope, right?

“However, a more profound, and much less recognized, reason for the low population growth rates was that women were able to use natural methods to control their own fertility rates. Throughout pre-colonial Africa, the Americas, and Asia, women used natural herbs to prevent pregnancy or to induce abortion.”

Okay now this is really funny. Can somebody please name me one “natural method” and one “natural herb” that prevents pregnancy and/or induces abortion?

He later completely undermines that absurd statement with his own words here:

“For environmental justice (EJ) activists the population debate comes down to a matter of women’s empowerment and self-determination. Both ecofeminist and EJ scholars and activists long have argued that the issue of population growth is actually about reproductive rights and wrongs. Women can and do control their own reproductive life cycle when they have the power and means to do so. The keys are equitable access to education, health care, and the means of production including farmland, seed, and water. Those countries that provide women meaningful access to education and health care have lowered their birth rates while simultaneously ameliorating the poverty of deprivation.”

Wy would women need access to education and health care to lower their birthrates if “natural methods” and “herbs” did if for millennia??

Check out the fights over the Mau forest in Kenya, where preservationists are trying to save the last of the flora and fauna, and starving indigenous people are trying to cut down every last tree and kill every last animal. That’s not from capitalism. Easter Island wasn’t capitalist, or even industrialized. Neither were the Anasazi. Much of what determines how long a particular civilization survives is a matter of accident – climate and topography. Ultimately, however, it’s just what people do – they overrun their resources. It’s simply gotten to the point where it is now on a global scale.

The custom among the Pirahã Indians of Brazil is that women give birth alone. The linguist Steve Sheldon once saw a Pirahã woman giving birth on a beach, while members of her tribe waited nearby. It was a breech birth, however, and the woman started crying in agony. “Help me, please! The baby will not come.” Sheldon went to help her, but the other Pirahã stopped him, saying that she didn’t want his help. The woman kept up her screams. The next morning both mother and baby were found dead.

The overarching theme here is that capitalism’s inherent need for growth is overrunning the planet. Your argument that humans are invariably unsustainable goes against all evidence of tribes and people who have/are living within the ebb and flow of the natural world’s resources.

Your attempt at trying to discredit this theme, which for me is already settled, amounts to nitpicking.

I respect your point of view, but the evidence in my favor is overwhelming. Sorry. When all is said and done, I’m a humanist, not anti-human.

I hope you’re not implying that I’m anti-human! Some of my best friends are human. I love humans even though I think this applies to us just as well to every other species:

“All species expand as much as resources allow and predators, parasites, and physical conditions permit. When a species is introduced into a new habitat with abundant resources that accumulated before its arrival, the population expands rapidly until all the resources are used up. In wine making, for example, a population of yeast cells in freshly-pressed grape juice grows exponentially until nutrients are exhausted — or waste products become toxic.” — David Price; http://dieoff.com/page137.htm

So maybe I am even more of a humanist than you would suspect.

Also rather than nit-picking I would really like the evidence that is in your favor, about any examples of tribes who live within the ebb and flow of the natural world’s resources; and of human population being held in check by “natural methods and herbs”.

@witsendnj:”I would really like the evidence that is in your favor, about any examples of tribes who live within the ebb and flow of the natural world’s resources.”

A partial list…the Balinese, the Iatmul, the Australian aborigines, the North American Sioux, the Yanomami of South America and the !Kung of the Kalahari.

@wistendnj:”…and of human population being held in check by “natural methods and herbs”.”

I’ll contact Devon G. Peña, Professor of American Ethnic Studies, Anthropology, and Environmental Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle, and see if I can get him to respond to you directly. (dpena@u.washington.edu)

There are a number of books which I’m going to take the time to read so that I can blog about them. In my next post I’ll talk briefly about my reading list. One of them is Gregory Bateson‘s “Bali: The Value System of a Steady State”.

apparently they did have a form of birth control, don’t know if you would call it natural or not: “This grotesque and revolting practice has an obvious explanation. The Australian Aborigines are probably the first primitive people to devise a wholly effective birth control. In the baking wilderness they inhabit, numbers must be kept down, for they cannot maintain large families on their low level of subsistence; and long treks would be impossible with a large family of small children and babies in arms.”

There IS a solution to this merry-go-round. Stop accounting for meaningful energy expended. To see how and why We presently do that, and how We can make major changes for the betterment of Humanity, see:

Not only did I read Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, I studied it and gave workshops about it. But I had to search elsewhere because I had the feeling there was something missing in her analysis and I could not find out what. Then, I came across a study that precisely links the witches hunts in central Europe with the climate changes of the Little Ice Age. The persecutions are exactly correlated with the long and frequent very cold spells which brought epidemics, famine, social unrest, massive depopulation. There was winter coming back in July, periods of 10 to 20 years! without crops, very cold spells lasting for months, storms of an unknown strenght and magnitude for the humans living in those times. So the only solution left for humans who always want “to do” something: they started to look for scapegoats. Of course, there is even more to it.

The Renaissance could only happen when the climate came back to more hospitable weather. All this to say that this period of colonisation of the earth, slave traffic on a large scale, depopulation of the Americas by Europeans who were carrying lethal viruses because they were accustomed to live in the proximity of domestic animals, emerging capitalism, destruction of the commons, and much more is a very, very complex period and it is almost impossible to take all the factors into account. Federici’s work is extremely interesting, but by no means exhaustive.

About the “Damocracy” video, its a bit of a dilemma as its clear that the dam in Brazil will allow “green energy” in the form of hydroelectric, instead of even bigger CO2 emissions from coal and gas plants which is also an alternative. Of course going to the root of the problem is figuring out why the initial need for energy lies in the first place, which of course is capitalism and the mining of the planets resources as the expense of people and their freedom. There is in that regard no doubt to why this is devastating, but I can clearly see the problem for any group of people to fight for their rights as we push for “green energy” often means more dams for hydroelectric and areas covered with solar and windmills. In some sense this direction is way better than making lots of new polluting gas plants which unfortunately only seems to be the only alternative atm for keeping up with the pressure on demand…..

Unless we opt to let it all collapse, which I am quite sure a lot of people wouldn’t mind either. The people living by those rivers in Brazil are probably the ones who wouldn’t notice a thing if Wall Street crashed and died along with the industrial machine that capitalism has created these past 200 years…

Simple: to rely upon goods & services based upon resources works only for those who know how to do goods & services: the froth & scum that float atop the pond are a useless, often poisonous, growth; whatever their self-approval ratings may say. Many problems are the result of having this layer in the system.

EveryOne has a gift – but in the system as it stands, most never have the opportunity to develop that gift. Instead, They are used as Human energy sources. Rather than see the struggling Humanity as “scum” (which more fits the sociopath that would call Humans “scum”), remove the need for Human energy to run the system, freeing Humans to find Their gifts and develop them.

What would happen if We did not NEED exchange (trade, barter, money, metal, etc.) to survive richly? I ask because there IS a way to eliminate this need. Such exchange is merely the accounting for meaningful energy expended in an energy-scarce society.

Given this, it is clear that adding abundant free energy – and programmed machines for any necessary work no One WANTS to do – will remove the necessity of accounting for energy, freeing every Human to choose where, when and how Their energy is applied. It will free Them from HAVING to add Their energy to a system to survive.

This will also pull the money rug out from under the banksters and other “elite.”

It will not take materially from anyOne in terms of home, comforts, and so on, but it will remove power over Others in favor of autonomous power over Self.

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